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tightened on my neck. “You look like a goddess when you come, did you know that?”
    Sex makes bumble-tongued fools even out of the most eloquent, but the beauty of it is that it also tunes our ears to hear the meaning of words that, spoken under other circumstances, would make us laugh or cry or frown.
    “I’m not a goddess.”
    “Not a goddess. Not an angel. Not a devil.” His breath, whiskey-scented, washed over me. The wetness of his tongue caressed my earlobe, making me shiver again. “Are you a ghost? Because you can’t be real.”
    In reply, I took his hand and put it on my chest, over the place my heart had begun its triple-thumping once more. “I’m real.”
    His thumb passed over my nipple, which tightened. His hand covered my breast, but he didn’t fondle me. He held it against me, and I knew he could feel the beat of my heart.
    Then he took his hand away and took mine from its place on his crotch. He moved back in his seat a little. His hair had fallen tousled over his forehead. His face was somber, eyes bright with reflected neon.
    He reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a business card. He put it on the table between us, then pushed it in front of me.
    “The next time I watch you come,” he said, “I want to be inside you.”
    Then he got up from the table and left me there, alone.

Chapter 03
    “D aniel Stewart.” His name, embossed in fine black script upon heavy, cream-colored card stock. Expensive, elegant, without a hint of the whimsy he’d shown me in Sweet Heaven. So much and so little to be learned from a business card.
    I waited a week before I called him.
    “Next time,” he’d said, as if there could be no doubt there would be a next time.
    That easy confidence set me back, but more than that was the realization I wanted there to be a next time. I wanted to see him again, wanted to feel his hands on me, wanted to come with him inside me, as he’d said.
    I wanted all those things, and the wanting frightened me. Knowing his name, where he worked, glimpsing that part of his life from something so intimately anonymous as his business card, all of it had me tossing and turning each night in my bed. Solace came from my hand, a finger gently circling my clit as I imagined his face and the scent of him. I came hard, alone, gasping and unfulfilled, and knew there would be a next time, just as he’d said, even though it took me seven days to give in.
    His secretary took the call and passed it on. I imagined a tone of smugness, curiosity, jealousy. Was he fucking his secretary? Did she imagine me as a client, colleague, sister, lover? She asked only my name and if Mr. Stewart would know what this call was in regard to, and when I answered yes, she put me through without hesitation.
    “Elle.” His voice, warm, like honey dripping into tea. “I was just thinking about you.”
    “Were you?”
    My own office door was closed. I sat back in my chair, the curling cord of my ancient phone tangled in my fingers. I closed my eyes.
    “I was.”
    “What were you thinking?”
    “I was thinking,” he said, his voice sending a slow shiver of delight down my spine, “that you weren’t going to call me.”
    That made me smile a little. Surely he’d had no doubts? “You knew I would.”
    “I didn’t.” I heard an answering smile in his tone and pictured the upcurve of his mouth. “I thought you’d forgotten about me.”
    “I haven’t.”
    “So you’ll be coming to meet me for lunch today.”
    The assumption was no more forward than what he’d said when he handed me his card, and there was no sense in playing coy. “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    He gave me directions to a restaurant, though I knew how to get there. I wrote anyway, my pen making smooth marks that belied the unsteadiness of my hand. I hung up the phone, uncertain of how the conversation had ended, and looked to see that I had written his name, over and over, in handwriting that looked like it belonged to a